Reading an “Album” from Qajar Iran

In the late nineteenth century, westerners traveling and living in the Middle East frequently purchased photographs from commercial studios that they used as memory aids and visual corroboration of their travel tales. The Getty Research Institute recently acquired such a collection of mounted albumen photographs recording late nineteenth-century Iran, which were likely purchased by a European and bound together as an album, now dispersed. This article conducts a close reading and historical contextualization of the photographs to analyze the purchaser’s interests and reconstruct a potential partial narrative for the album. It also analyzes the commercial practice of one of Iran’s most prolific photographers, Antoin Sevruguin (ca. 1851–1933), and suggests a new framework for reading photographs attributed to his studio.